


Your Collection of Mother Mary Plaques is Admirable (But Why Is One In The Bathroom?)

by jattendrai



Series: Boys & Girls Universe [2]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Transitioning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:19:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21752872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jattendrai/pseuds/jattendrai
Summary: But that was him, he could recognize. He no longer saw his mirror self as a smearing of him, or a person that was him; now it’s just him, staring at himself, not staring back, but directly at himself. He could see his imperfect skin, the birthmark across his cheek, his weirdly proportioned shoulders and newly cut hair starting to curl at the pink-tinted ends. He could recognize himself as himself, in a silly outfit and weird haircut, but that was him.
Series: Boys & Girls Universe [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1567807
Comments: 2
Kudos: 51





	Your Collection of Mother Mary Plaques is Admirable (But Why Is One In The Bathroom?)

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is related once again to my human/modern au BOYS & GIRLS, of which I don't know how to link but you should read before you read this ( or not! do whatever you want, im not your mother)
> 
> This was an anon request of which I think I butchered a bit, but I hope you like it nonetheless anon. this is also in fact inspired by That One Basement Sessions recording I talk about too much.

The first ounce of freedoms from the jaws of his mother was found in the escape of his friend’s bathroom.

Some would say that his mother did not have any sort of grip on him, because she wasn’t direct and sever with it; but she sewed into him gently until she had every inch of him under her grasp. She was that type of mother who never yelled or harmed him, but with gentle words and touches would dig into him, like the way a tree slowly uproots another with slowly and meticulously.

By the time he was a so-called adult was her damage absolute, and he was at his limit before he lost his binding to soil and would fall over; so he booked it the fuck out of there, and now stood in the world’s smallest bathroom in the basement of his weird lover-to-weird-friend’s house while a full-blown house party went on above him.

It was that weird retro 80s interior, with the wooden walls and chipping white paint on the cabinets and ceilings, cracked ceramic tub and sink and a very beaten up medicine cabinet that looked ready to fall into the sink. He was standing there, greasy and ugly as hell, twenty years of damage and weird eating habits and severe dysphoria smearing a strange picture of himself in the mirror. He also noticed Rouxls had a thing for mother mary decorations, as one stared at him from the top of the doorframe --- hey, props to the guy, at least he likes being stared at.

Staring at himself more in the mirror reveals more details of him that he failed to notice all those years before: his hair got well past his ribs and had a pretty decent curl at the edge but was otherwise flat hair ( possibly due to the intense amount of bleaching it went through recently); his eyes were smaller than he imagined, and his curved nose looked much more like his mother’s despite him getting that genetic chunk from his father; the nail polish on his hands were chipping and a different color from what was on his toes, and the foundation he had smeared on his face was definitely too SPF-heavy as it left a white cast on his dark skin.

He started with the hair first, then. He had to bother Rouxls for a pair of scissors since the only one he could find was about the size to cut fucking Barbie doll hair and nothing more, and soon he returned down the plush carpet to the small bathroom to lop all his hair off.

Not really, but jaw-length seemed to do it; he just started cutting mindlessly at sections of hair he grabbed at, not knowing where to put the long fistfulls of hair ( would Locks For Love take it? Was that even a good organization?) he decided to lay them out one-by-one around the sink, until he had five strips of long black-and-blonde hair and his head felt five pounds lighter. Looking at himself in the mirror again revealed more details no longer hidden behind locks and locks of black: the fact that his shoulders were very broad and one was off angle; his rather large ears and that his neck looked awkward and thin.

Each strip of hair was placed into small ziploc bags ( produced by Rouxls, who Mettaton was now bugging via text as the party upstairs sounded pretty abundant via the footsteps slamming above him, and he didn’t want to be seen by anybody), and thrown to a corner on the floor. He decided it was time to get rid of his makeup, and turning the sink’s weird glass handles produced probably the world’s hottest water that he ever felt come out of a shitty sink --- but he splashed it against his face and rubbed, feeling his CoverGirl sliding off like he was shedding feathers. A brief look in the mirror confirmed that it, in fact, did not even match his skin color, but it was the deepest shade available and he was too hopped up on the teenage pain to notice.

It felt good to get that disgusting stuff off his face, the pounds of makeup he felt such a weird need to wear ( was it because he looked sickly, like his mother said? Was it because all the girls around him did, and he felt like he simply found himself ugly because he wasn’t wearing it too instead of any sort of dysphoria-related reason? Either way, it was awful). His eyeshadow, his mascara, the greasy concealer he didn’t even understand all washed away under his hands, and when he pulled away he saw it all flush down the sink in a brown-and-black liquid flurry.

Now he felt like a freshly fledged bird hatched from an egg, with some of that gnarly yolk goo still on his face that was the leftover residue of primer, so he ripped the PVC-esque shower curtain to the side and started the shower.

The party had gotten rowdy above him, and he could fear every stomp and jump and jive shake the ceiling above him. Sometimes, if something smacked the right place on the floor, the yellow lights hanging above MTT would flicker, only topping off MTT’s conspiracy that this bathroom is just a tight hallway that was poorly fixed up to be a bathroom.

But he liked it, and how the panelling in the shower clashed with the wooden walls, and all the different shampoos and body washes Rouxls seemed to hoard down here, and how there was very obvious hair color stains in the tub ---

Hair color! Mettaton stopped the water for a moment and looked at the medicine cabinet.

He had seen some hair coloring in there from when he was snooping the medication labels, and thought  _ maybe  _ Rouxls wouldn’t be mad if he used that weird strawberry pink he spotted there.

The bleach seemed to have been pilfered from the box, so Mettaton simply had what little bleach blonde he had left in his hair to go off of. 

After some staining of the sink and his hands, the color was in, and he took a moment to reflect on the shitty toilet seat, bringing both his knees up and hugging them. 

His shit was everywhere in this bathroom at this point; from the duffle bag near the door and his bagged hair in the corner, his needed medication and all three of his toothbrushes he grabbed ( no toothpaste, though). He thought about how weird it was to touch his hair and have to move up to his head to feel it, instead of the long strands that he had been growing out since he was born.

How nice his skin felt without all that makeup on. How the hair coloring smelled vaguely grape-scented. How it sounded like they were listening to shitty emo upstairs now, or at least someone busted out their guitar for an impromptu concert --- Rouxls was a performer, so he wouldn’t be surprised if he had friends in the garage scene.

He focused on how the bathroom smelled like mold and old lady perfume. How he forgot to put vaseline on his neck before dyeing his hair. How there’s a spider up by the mother mary plaque.

The shower was nice, after he fiddled with the broken knobs and managed a decently hot temp. For the first time it felt good to take off all his clothes and kick them away, feeling more like shedding skin than losing protection. He never liked seeing what he looked like under the facade of baggy clothes, but the shower was ungodly small and the shampoo was potent enough to make him laugh, and he only laughed harder when the hair dye rinsed out to look like he was in a vat of fruit punch.

The palm of his hands slightly stained, and all the grease and sweat and layers of hatred slowly washed off, he managed to make it over to his duffle bag and dig for some new clothes --- the party was only an hour young, so he was sure he could slip in if he dressed nice enough.

There was the dresses his theatre friends stole for him from the productions of his favorite plays he could wear --- no, not right now. There was boundless amounts of tank tops and beaten up pants, but that was what he wore for years, and the feeling of them was like wearing dead skin now. The rest of what he had packed was just shoes and underwear.

_Let me borrow some clothes_ _  
_ _6:24pm_

The godsend that was Rouxls once again came to his rescue, and produced a random outfit into his hands. Closing the door and setting it on the toilet showed that it was some silly band shirt he remembered seeing Rouxls wear the day he ate shit down a hill, and black pants. A white shirt and tank top layered underneath gave Mettaton enough compression to not have to tango with a bra, and he looked at himself in the mirror to reveal a very scene-looking 2000s kid.

But that was him, he could recognize. He no longer saw his mirror self as a smearing of him, or a person that was him; now it’s just him, staring at himself, not staring  _ back _ , but  _ directly  _ at himself. He could see his imperfect skin, the birthmark across his cheek, his weirdly proportioned shoulders and newly cut hair starting to curl at the pink-tinted ends. He could recognize himself as himself, in a silly outfit and weird haircut, but that was him.

He could feel the sewing of his mother breaking in his body and coming undone, and carefully he mopped up the soaked floor with his towel and put on a pair of shoes, opening the bathroom door to let out the steam and move upstairs.

The music was loud, and the crowd was much bigger than before; but he slipped right in, hair still dripping wet onto his shoulders, but nobody seemed to notice him, or the fact that he was freakishly tall, or that his outfit looked really awkward on him because Rouxls and Mettaton had separate proportions, or that he was staring at his feet as he moved along. It was all the things his mother would gently pick at, that would sew underneath his skin.

But nobody said anything, and he found the table with drinks and food easily, taking a can and moving to where the music was; he was right to assume that someone was, in fact, setting up an impromptu concert, and there sat two people with guitars singing to a song the crowd seemed to know pretty well.

The couch was ugly and old, the walls were wooden, behind them sat hundreds of pictures of the mother mary on a jutting, the rug was thick under his shoes, and slowly the crowd grew in volume as they sang along to whatever song Mettaton didn’t know.

He could hear Rouxls shouting along, and everybody around him sang along; Mettaton couldn’t, but he knew nobody around him cared, not like his mother would.

Besides, there was plenty of time to learn the words, now.


End file.
